Re: blog: semantic dissonance in uniprot

samwald@gmx.at wrote:
>>   Can any one name a real world example of where confusion between an
>> entity and its record was issue?
>>     
>
> I would say that 80% of the RDF/OWL ontologies lingering somewhere on the web are examples. They are just so ill-designed that nobody wants to use them, and nobody CAN use them. The creators of these ontologies were unknowingly meandering between thinking describing things-in-reality, concepts, and abstract database records while creating these ontologies; a no-mans-land where almost any statement is somehow valid, and where there are thousand different ways to talk about a thing, because you are not really sure WHAT you are talking about.  
> Design processes like these lead to the kinds of difficulties described in the classic paper "Are the current ontologies in biology good ontologies?" [1]. I have worked with such ontologies, but they are bordering on being completely unusable -- at least for me.
>
> [1] http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nbt0905-1095
>
> Cheers,
> Matthias Samwald
>
> DERI Galway, Ireland
> http://deri.ie/
>
> Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution & Cognition Research, Austria
> http://kli.ac.at/
>   
Matthias,

Yes, it is very much an "open and shut" case re. data object identity. 
If you Identity at the datum level you won't have granularity (details). 
We all know that: the devil lies in the details :-)

Peter: a poor described concept should not be the basis for 
invalidation. I don't think the 303 reasoning has always been explained 
the right way, but do open yourself to understanding the core principle 
(which isn't a Web invention) and then you will see (if you don't 
already) why this is vital.




-- 


Regards,

Kingsley Idehen	      Weblog: http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen
President & CEO 
OpenLink Software     Web: http://www.openlinksw.com

Received on Tuesday, 24 March 2009 12:34:50 UTC